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Sunday, March 29, 2015

i don't really like to piece…i do like appliqué…mostly i love to just draw out designs and then cut out elements with my scissors…often without using a pattern or just a very loosely drawn line drawing…so if i said piecing is hard for me it would be an understatement…but sometimes the words of Eleanor Roosevelt "You must do the things you think you cannot do." can guide a person through difficult times…so i did just that…embarking on cutting and piecing very tiny squares, triangles and half-square triangles to make this small quilt…it is a kit by Kim Diehl from her Simple Whatnots Club #1

hanging out in the snow outside the back door

usually i use bright colours and find it hard to work outside my comfort zone but i am quite attracted to Kim Diehl fabrics

i did make a few mistakes but overall i am pretty happy with this little quilt called Meandering which measures 18 1/2 by 24 1/2

now on to the quilting… i will most likely quilt it diagonally in straight lines

Sunday, March 22, 2015

a while back i started working on a new design…i had a vision of a quilt with little Russian nesting dolls in rows across the quilt…i ordered some Kona solids from Sew Sisters a online quilt store here in Canada…i have lots of fabrics in my stash…i love fat quarters as it gives me a vast array of fabrics…but i did not have any solids…solids had never really landed a direct hit although they had crossed my radar…suddenly i knew i needed to have solids as well as prints for making my little dollies…out came my fabrics… i did buy a few new pieces of fabrics that seemed like they would make good dress fronts or scarves…out came the design and i set to work…i cut out all 20 background blocks…cut out all 20 dresses and 20 scarves…i used a fusible adhesive to attach my scarves to their backgrounds…this is where my story takes a sharp left into the ditch…it hit the ditch hard in the middle of the night when i woke up and realized i had not put hair on any of their faces and it should have gone under the scarf which was now fixed down with fusible web…OMG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! so now my whole quilt came to a stop… many many many months later i tried to peel one of those stuck down scarves back and put a little black piece of hair under it…well i could do it but it left the edge frayed and ugly… back to the UFO pile it all went…last week i went out to visit a friend…that visit left me full of inspiration…home i came and set to work…

OMG no hair!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! now what

i used bias bars to make little bias stripes to cover where i put the hair over the edge of the scarf…

now all the parts are here

using Roxanne's Glue-Baste-It i attached a bias stripe around each edge of my doll face…dried the glue with my iron and then stitched them down on the edges…

the bias strips glued down but still in need of topstitching

enter the yo-yos…i am really loving yo-yos as of late…last summer i made quite a few yo-yos in different sizes...i have my hands firmly on the sides of the yo-yo vortex to keep me from being sucked right in…although at times i feel like i am loosing my grip as i have visions of other quilt designs with yo-yos

some of the 400 plus yo-yos i made last summer

i had made them with the idea of using them in my quilts…i knew they would make for great decoration on my little dollies…